Home Sweet Hell – Blu-ray Edition

It is films like this one that makes me want to never watch another movie again…but then I remember there are gems out there waiting to be discovered and I persevere. My advice to anyone who doesn’t have to watch this film to stay away as it is mind numbingly bad.

Oftentimes in suburbia behind the near perfect sheen if you take the time to look closely you will find a wealth of unhappy and mentally unstable people. Such is the case with the Champagne family. Don (Patrick Wilson – The Conjuring, Watchmen) owns a furniture store, has two kids and is married to a beautiful woman, Mona (Katherine Heigl – from television’s State of Affairs). From the outside it looks like he has everything in that they are rich and seem happy. In reality Don is an undersexed and controlled man who lives in fear of making his mentally unstable wife angry. Mona controls everything from when they will have sex, to what language classes their kids will take (French) to how much Don works out. Everything in her world must be perfect or else. When Don goes outside the box and hires a new employee at the store everything in Mona’s tightly controlled world changes.

Don hires a new salesperson at the store. Dusty (Jordana Brewster – The Fast and the Furious, The Faculty) is a beautiful, single mom who now works for Don and with Les (John Belushi – New Year’s Eve, Return to Me). Soon after Don and Dusty end up in an affair and she comes to him with the news that she is pregnant. Don doesn’t know what to do knowing that Mona will literally kill him if she finds out about the affair and pregnancy. His back is up against the wall and he is pushed to lengths he did not think himself capable of.

I flip flop when it comes to Katherine Heigl. Sometimes I feel like she is a decent actress who has gotten a rough ride from the public and critics alike while others I just want to slap her in the face. The truth is somewhere in the middle in all likelihood. Some of her bad reputation is due to her poor choice of films while most of it is due to the reputation she has (whether true or not) of being difficult to work with. It is the choice of making films like this one that hurts Katherine Heigl’s case. It is awful and she is terrible in it. The character she is portraying verges on a caricature and Heigl goes completely overboard in her portrayal of the unbalanced Mona.

Obviously director Anthony Burns (Skateland) was going for a dark comedy, but it is so heavy handed that it becomes a joke. And not a good one. As the minutes of the film plod on you think to yourself that this is a candidate for worst film of the year. It is that painful. So much so that I wished at certain points that Mona would make me her next target. I wanted a quick out. As the clichés piled up and the awful acting continued I decided that this film should have been called Hell On Earth (meaning for those who have the misfortune of watching it).

Special Features:

-Deleted Scenes

-Outtakes

-Champagne Furniture & Rugs Commercial

-Suburban Butchery: Making Home Sweet Hell

-Previews of The Wedding Ringer, Predestination, 50 to 1, To Write Love on Her Arms, The Intruders